“Eighties” by Killing Joke

"Eighties" was the lead single from Night Time, Killing Joke's fifth album, in 1985, and it's post-punk with its fists up: a pounding, relentless rhythm, Geordie Walker's guitar buzzing like a power line in the rain and Jaz Coleman barking like a man reading out a warning. Back in December 1983 the band had given it its first airing on The Tube, the British music programme.

All four members share the writing credit, and you can hear the whole unit at work: Paul Raven's bass throbbing, Paul Ferguson's drums hammering, Coleman adding keyboards around his vocal. Chris Kimsey produced it, and the result sounds like a march that's forgotten where it was headed.

It reached number 60 in Britain on release, but the song has had a long afterlife in film and television. It turned up in a party scene in Weird Science in 1985, gave the 2002 sitcom That '80s Show its opening theme, became the theme of the Investigation Discovery series The 1980s: The Deadliest Decade, and played over the closing credits of an episode of The Lincoln Lawyer.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.